To the Rural Poor

An Explanation for the Peasants of What the Social-Democrats Want

3. Riches and Poverty, Property-Owners and Workers in the Countryside

Weknow now what the Social-Democrats want. They want to fight the whole
	of the rich class to free the people from poverty. In our countryside
	there is no less and, perhaps, even more poverty than there is in the
	towns. We shall not speak here about how great the poverty in the
	countryside is. Every worker who has been in the country and every
	peasant are well acquainted with want, hunger, and ruin in the
	countryside.

Butthe peasant does not know thecauseof his distress, hunger
	and destitution, orhowto rid himself of this want. To know
	this one must first find out what causes all want and poverty in both
	town and countryside. We have already dealt with this briefly, and we
	have seen that the poor peas ants and rural workers must unite with the
	urban workers. But that is not enough. We must also find out what sort
	of people in the countryside will follow the rich, the property-owners,
	and what sort of people will follow the workers, the
	Social-Democrats. We must find out whether there are many peasants who,
	no less than the landlords, are able to acquire capital and live on the
	labour of others. Unless we get to the bottom of this matter, no amount
	of talking about poverty will be of any use, and the rural poor will not
	knowwhoin the countryside must unite among themselves and
	with the urban Workers, orwhatmust be done to make it adependableunion and to prevent the peasant from being
	hoodwinked by his own kind, the rich peasant, as well as by the
	landlord.

Toget to the bottom of this let us now see how strong the landlords are
	and how strong the rich peasants are in the countryside.

Letus begin with the landlords. We can judge of their strength in the
	first place by the amount of land they own as private property. The
	total amount of land in European Russia, including peasant allotment
	land and privatelyowned land, has been calculated at about 240,000,000

      dessiatines[1](except the state lands, of which we shall speak separately). Out of this
      total of 240,000,000 dessiatines, 131,000,000 dessiatines of allotment
      land are held by the peasants, that is to say, byover ten million
      households;whereas 109,000,000 dessiatines are held by private
      owners, i.e., byless than half a million families.Thus, even if
      we take the average, every peasant family holds 13 dessiatines, while
      every family of private owners owns 218 dessiatines! But the distribution
      of the land is much more unequal, as we shall presently see.

Ofthe 109,000,000 dessiatines owned by private ownerssevenmillion areroyal demesnes, in other words, the private property
      of the members of the imperial family. The tsar, with his family, is the
      first landlord, the biggest landowner in Russia.Onefamily
      possessesmoreland thanhalf a millionpeasant
      families! Further, the churches and monasteries own aboutsixmillion dessiatines of land. Our priests preach frugality and abstinence
      to the peasants, but they themselves have, by fair means and foul,
      accumulated an enormous amount of land.

Further,about two million dessiatines are owned by the cities and towns,
      and an equal amount by various commercial and industrial companies and
      corporations. Ninety-two million dessiatines (the exact figure is
      91,605,845, but to simplify matters we will quote round figures) belong toless than half a million(481,358) families of private
      owners. Half these families are quite small owners, owning less than ten
      dessiatines of land each, and all of them together own less than one
      million dessiatines. On the other hand,sixteen thousandfamilies
      ownover one thousanddessiatines each; and the total land owned
      by them amounts tosixty-five million dessiatines.What vast
      areas of land are concentrated in the hands of the big land owners is also
      to be seen in the fact thatjust under onethousand families(924) ownmore than ten thousand
	dessiatineseach, and all together they owntwenty-seven
	million dessiatines!One thousand families own as much land as is
	owned by two million peasant families.

Obviously,millions and tens of millions of people areboundto
      live in poverty and starvation andwill go onliving in poverty
      and starvation as long as such vast areas of land are owned by a few
      thousand of the rich. Obviously, the state authorities, the government
      itself (even the tsar’s government) will always dance to the tune of these
      big land owners. Obviously, the rural poor can expect no help from anyone,
      or from any quarter, until they unite, combine in a single class to wage a
      stubborn, desperate struggle against the landlord class.

Atthis point we must observe that very many people in this country
      (including even many people of education) have a totally wrong idea about
      the strength of the landlord class; they say that the “state”
      owns much more land. These bad counsellors of the peasant say: “A
      large portion of the territory [i. e., of all the land] of Russia already
      belongs to the state.”  (These words are taken from the news paperRevolutsionnaya Rossiya, No. 8, p. 8.) The mistake these people
      make arises from the following. They have heard that thestateowns 150,000,000 dessiatines of land in European Russia. That is true. But
      they forget that these 150,000,000 dessiatines consist almost entirely ofuncultivable land and forests in the Far North, in the Archangel,
      Vologda, Olonets, Vyatka, and Perm gubernias. Thus, the state has retained
      only that land which up to the present has been quite unfit for
      cultivation. The cultivable land owned by the state amounts toless
      than four million dessiatines.And these cultivable state lands (for
      example, in Samara Gubernia, where they are particularly extensive), are
      leased for very low rents, for next to nothing, to the rich. The rich
      lease thousands and tens of thous ands of dessiatines of these lands and
      then sublet them to the, peasants at exorbitant rents.

Thepeople who say that the state owns a great deal of land are very bad
      counsellors of the peasant. The actual case is that the big private
      landowners (including the tsar personally) own a lot of good land, and the
      state itself isin the hands of these big landowners. As long as the rural poor fail to
      unite, and by uniting become a formidable force, the “state”
      will always remain the obedient servant of the landlord class. There is
      another thing that must not be forgotten: formerly almost all the
      landlords were nobles. The nobility still owns a vast amount of land (in
      1877-78, 115,000 nobles owned 73,000,000 dessiatines). But today money,
      capital, has become the ruling power. Merchants and well-to-do peasants
      have bought very large amounts of land. It is estimated that in the course
      of thirty years (from 1863 to 1892) the nobility lost (i. e., sold more
      than they bought) land to the value of over six hundred million
      rubles. And merchants and honorary citizens have acquired land to the
      value of 250,000,000 rubles. Peasants, Cossacks, and “other rural
      inhabitants” (as our government calls the common folk, to
      distinguish them from the “gentry,” the “clean public”) have
      acquired land to the value of 300,000,000 rubles. Thus, on the average,
      every year, the peasants in the whole of Russia acquire land as private
      property to the value of 10,000,000 rubles.

Andso, there are different sorts of peasants: some live in poverty and
      starvation; others grow rich. Consequently, the number of rich peasants
      who incline towards the landlords and will take the side of the rich
      against the workers is increasing. The rural poor who want to unite with
      the urban workers must carefully ponder over this and find out whether
      there are many rich peasants of this kind, how strong they are, and what
      kind of a union we need to fight this force. We have just mentioned the
      bad counsellors of the peasant. Those bad counsellors are fond of saying
      that the peasants already have such a union. That union is themir, the village commune. Themir, they say, is a great
      force. Themirunites the peasants very closely; the organisation
      (i.e., the association, unity) of the peasants in themiris
      colossal (i.e., enormous, boundless).

Thatis wrong. It is a tale. A tale invented by kind hearted people, but a
      tale nevertheless. If we listen to tales we shall only wreck our cause,
      the cause of uniting the rural poor with the urban workers. Let every
      rural inhabitant look round carefully: is the unity of themir,
      is the peasant commune, at all like a union of the poor to fightallthe rich,allthose who live on the labour of others? No, it is
      not, and it cannot be. In every village, in every commune, there are many
      farm labourers, many impoverished peasants, and there are rich peasants
      who employ farm labourers and buy land “in perpetuity.” These rich
      peasants are also members of the commune, and it is they who lord it in
      the commune because they are a force. But do we need a union to which the
      rich belong, and which is lorded over by the rich? Of course not. We need
      a union tofightthe rich. And so, the unity of themiris no good to us at all.

Whatwe need is a voluntary union, a union only of people who have
      realised that they must unite with the urban workers. The village commune,
      however, is not a voluntary union; it is enforced by the state. The
      village commune does not consist of people who work for the rich and who
      want to unite to fight the rich. The village commune consists of all sorts
      of people, not because they want to be in it, but because their parents
      lived on the same land and worked for the same landlord, because the
      authorities have registered them as members of that commune. The poor
      peasant are not free to leave the commune; they are not free to accept in
      the commune a man whom the police have registered in another volost, but
      whom we may need for our union in a particular village. No, we need a very
      different kind of union, a voluntary union consisting only of labourers
      and poor peasants to fight all those who live on the labour of others.

Thetimes when themirwas a force have long passed, never to
      return. Themirwas a force when hardly any of the peasants were
      farm labourers, or workers wandering over the length and breadth of Russia
      in search of a job, when there were hardly any rich peasants, when all
      were equally ground down by the feudal landlords. But now money has become
      the principal power. Members of the same commune will now fight one
      another for money like wild beasts. The moneyed peasants sometimes oppress
      and fleece their fellow peasants more than the landlords do. What we need
      today is not .the unity of themir, but a union against thepower of money, against the rule of capital, a union of all the
      rural labourers and of all the poor peasants of different communes, a
      union of all the rural poor with the urban workers to fight both the
      landlords and the rich peasants.

Wehave seen how strong the landlords are. We must now see whether there
      are many rich peasants and how strong they are.

Weestimate the strength of the landlords by the size of their estates, by
      the amount of land they own. The landlords are free to dispose of their
      land, free to buy land and to sell it. That is why it is possible to judge
      their strength very accurately by the amount of land they own.

      The peas ants,however, still lack the right freely to dispose of their land; they are
      still semi-serfs, tied to their village commune. Hence, the strength of
      the rich peasants cannot be judged by the amount of allotment land they
      hold. The rich peasants do not grow rich on their allotments; theybuya considerable amount of land, buying both “in
      perpetuity” (i.e., as their private property) and “for a
      number of years” (i.e., on lease); they buy both from the landlords
      and from their fellow peasants, from those peasants who leave the land, or
      are compelled by want to let their holdings. It will therefore be more
      correct to divide the rich, middle, and poor peasants according to the
      number of horses they own. A peasant who owns many horses will nearly
      always be a rich peasant; if he keeps many draught animals it shows that
      he cultivates a lot of land, owns land besides his communal allotment, and
      has money saved up. Moreover, we are in a position to calculate the number
      of peasants owning many horses in the whole of Russia (European Russia,
      exclusive of Siberia and the Caucasus). Of course, it must not be
      forgotten that we can speak of the whole of Russia only in averages: the
      different uyezds and gubernias vary to a considerable degree. For
      instance, in the neighbourhood of cities we often find rich peasant
      farmers who keep very few horses. Some of them engage in
      market-gardening—a profitable business; others keep few horses but
      many cows and sell milk. In all parts of Russia there are also peasants
      who do not make money out of the land, but engage in trade: they run
      creameries, hulling-mills, and other enterprises. Everybody who lives in
      the country very well knows of rich peasants in his own village or
      district. But we want to know how many there are in the whole of Russia
      and how strong they are, so that the poor peasant shall not have to guess
      and go about blind fold, as it were, but know exactly his friends and his
      foes.

Wellthen, let us see whether there are many peasants who are rich or poor
      in horses. We have already said that the total number of peasant
      households in Russia is estimated at aboutten million.Between
      them they now own, probably, aboutfifteen millionhorses (about
      fourteen years ago the number was seventeen million, but it is smaller
      now). Thus, on the average, everytenhouseholds havefifteenhorses. But the whole point is that some of them—a
      few— own many horses, while others—very many—own no
      horses, or very few. There are atleast three millionpeasants,
      who own no horses, and about three and a half millionown one horse
      each.All these are either utterly ruined or very poor peasants. We
      call these the rural poor. They numbersix and a halfmillion out
      of a total of ten million, that is to say,almost two-thirds!Next come the middle peasants who own a pair of draught animals
      each. These peasants numberabout twomillion households, owningabout fourmillion horses. Then come the rich peasants each of
      whom owns more than one pair of draught animals. Such compriseone
      andahalf millionhouseholds, but they ownseven and a
      halfmillion

      horses.[2]Thus, about one-sixth of the total house holds own half the total number
      of horses.

Nowthat we know this we are in a position to judge fairly accurately the
      strength of the rich peasants. In number they are very few: in the
      different communes and volosts they will comprise ten to twenty households
      in every hundred. But these few households are the richest. TakingRussia as a whole, they own almost as many horses as all the other
      peasants taken together. That means that their land under crops must also
      amount to nearly half the total area sown to crops by the peasants. Such
      peasants harvest much more grain than they require for their
      families. They sell large quantities of grain. They grow grain not merely
      to feed themselves, but grow it chiefly for sale, to make money. Peasants
      like these can save money. They deposit it in savings-banks and
      banks. They buy land as property. We have already said how much land the
      peasants all over Russia buy every year; nearly all this land goes to
      these few rich peasants. The rural poor have to think not of buying land,
      but of getting enough to eat. Often they have not enough money to buy
      grain, let alone land. Therefore, the banks in general and the Peasants’
      Bank in particular do not help all peasants to buy land (as is sometimes
      asserted by people who try to deceive the muzhik or by the very
      simple-minded), but only an insignificant number of peasants, only the
      rich peasants. Therefore, the peasant’s evil counsellors whom we have
      mentioned tell an untruth when they say that the land is being bought by
      the peasants, that it is passing from capital to labour. The land can
      never pass to labour, that is, to the poor working man, because land has
      to be paid for with money. But the poor never have any money to spare. The
      land can go only to the rich, moneyed peasants, to capital, to those
      people against whom the rural poor mustfightin alliance with
      the urban workers.

Therich peasants not only buy land in perpetuity; most often they take
      land for a number of years, on lease. By renting large plots they prevent
      the rural poor from getting land. For example, it has been calculated how
      much land rich peasants have rented in a single uyezd (Konstantinograd) in
      Poltava Gubernia. And what do we find? The number who rented thirty
      dessiatines or more per house hold is very small, only two out of every
      fifteen households. But these rich peasants have gained possession ofone halfof all the rented land, and each of them has on the
      averageseventy-five dessiatinesof the rented land! Or take
      Taurida Gubernia, where a calculation has been made of how much of the
      land rented by the peasants from the state through themir,
      through the village commune, has been grabbedby the rich. It has been found that the rich, who account for onlyone-fifthof the total number of households, have grabbedthree-fourthsof the rented land. Everywhere land goes to those
      who have money, and only the few rich have money.

Further,much land is now let by the peasants themselves. The peasants
      abandon their holdings because they have no livestock, no seed, nothing
      with which to run their farms. Today even land is of no use unless you
      have money. For instance, in Novouzensk Uyezd in Samara Gubernia, one,
      sometimes even two, out of every three rich peasant house holdsrent
      allotment landin their own or in another commune. The allotments are
      let by those who have no horses, or only one horse. In Taurida Gubernia as
      much asone-thirdof all peasant households let their
      allotments.One-fourthof the peasant allotments, a quarter of a
      million dessiatines, are let. Of this quarter of a million dessiatines,
      one hundred and fifty thousand dessiatines (three-fifths) are rented by
      rich peasants! This, too, shows whether the unity of themir, the
      commune, is of any use to the poor. In the village commune, he who has
      money has power. What we need is the unity of the poor of all communes.

Justas with land purchase, the peasants are deceived by talk about buying
      cheap ploughs, harvesters, and all sorts of improved implements. Zemstvo
      stores and artels are set up and it is said: improved implements will
      better the conditions of the peasantry. That is mere deception. All these
      improved implements always go to the rich; the poor get next to
      nothing. They cannot think of buying ploughs and harvesters; they have
      enough to do to keep body and soul together!  All this sort of
      “helping the peasants” is nothing but helping the rich. As for
      the mass of the poor, who have neither land, livestock, nor reserves, they
      will not benefit by the fact that the better implements will be
      cheaper. Here is an example. In an uyezd in Samara Gubernia all the
      improved implements belonging to the poor and to the rich peasants have
      been taken stock of. It was found thatone-fifthof all
      households, i.e., the most well-to-do, owned almostthree-fourthsof the improved implements, while thepoor—halfthe
      households—had onlyone-thirtieth.Out of a total of 28,000
      households, 10,000 possessed one horseeach, or none; these 10,000 had onlysevenimproved implements
      out of a total of 5,724 improved implements owned by all the peasant
      households in the uyezd. Seven out of 5,724—that is the share of the
      rural poor in all these farm improvements, in all this increase in the
      number of ploughs and harvesters which are supposed to help “all the
      peasantry”!  That is what the rural poor must expect from those who talk
      about “improving peasant farming”!

Finally,one of the main features of the rich peasants is that theyhire farm-hands and day labourers.Like the landlords, the rich
	peasants also live on the labour of others. Like the landlords, they
	grow rich because the mass of the peasants are ruined and
	pauperised. Like the landlords, they try to squeeze as much work as they
	can out of their farm-hands and to pay them as little as possible. If
	millions of peasants were not utterly ruined and compelled to go to work
	for others, become hired labourers, sell their labour-power—the
	rich peasants could not exist, could not carry on their farms. There
	would be no “abandoned” allotments for them to pick up and
	no labourers for them to hire. The million and a half rich peasants
	throughout Russia certainly hire no less than amillionfarm-hands and day labourers. Obviously, in the great struggle between
	the propertied class and the class of the propertyless, between masters
	and workers, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the rich
	peasants will take the side of the property-owners against the working
	class.

Wenow know the position and the strength of the rich peasantry. Let us
      examine the conditions of the rural poor.

Wehave already said that the rural poor comprise the vast majority,
      almost two-thirds, of the peasant households throughout Russia. To begin
      with, the number of households without horses cannot be less thanthree million—probablymore than that today, perhaps three
      and a half million. Every famine year, every crop failure, ruins tens of
      thou sands of farms. The population grows, life on the land becomes more
      crowded, but all the best land has been grabbed by the landlords and the
      rich peasants. And so, every year more and more people are ruined, go to
      the towns and the factories, take work as farm-hands, or become unskilled
      labourers. A peasant who has no horse is one who has becomequite poor. He is a proletarian. He gains a living (if you can call it
      living; it would be truer to say that he just contrives to keep body and
      soul together) not from the land, not from his farm, butby working
      for hire.He is brother to the town worker. Even land is of no use to
      the peasant without a horse: half the households without horseslet
      their allotments, while some even surrender them to the commune for
      nothing (and sometimes even pay the difference between the taxes and the
      expected income from the land!) because they are not in a position to till
      their land. A peasant who has no horse sows one dessiatine, or two at the
      most. He always has to buy additional grain (if he has the money to buy it
      with)— his own crop will never suffice to feed him. Peasants who own
      one horse each, and there are about three and a half million such
      households throughout Russia, are not very much better off. Of course,
      there are exceptions, and we have already said that, here and there, there
      are peasants with one horse each who are doing middling well, or are even
      rich. But we are not speaking of exceptions, of individual localities, but
      of Russia as a whole. If we take the entire mass of peasants who have one
      horse each, there can be no doubt that they are a mass of paupers. Even in
      the agricultural gubernias the peasant who has one horse sows only three
      or four dessiatines, rarely five; his crop does not suffice either. Even
      in a good year his food is no better than that of a peasant without a
      horse—which means that he is always underfed, always starves. His
      farm is in decay, his livestock is poor and short of fodder, and he is not
      in a position to look after his land properly. The peasant who owns one
      horse—in Voronezh Gubernia, for instance—can afford to spend
      (not counting expenditure on fodder) not more thantwenty rubles a
      yearon the whole of his farm! (A rich peasant spendsten times
      as much.) Twenty rubles a year for rent, to buy livestock, repair his
      wooden plough and other implements, pay the shepherd, and for everything
      else! Do you call that farming? It is sheer misery, hard labour, endless
      drudgery. It is natural that some of the peasants with one horse each, and
      not a few, should alsolet their allotments.Even land is of
      little use to a pauper. He has no money and his land does not even provide
      him with enough to eat, let alone with money. But money is needed for
      everything: for food,for clothing, for the farm, and to pay taxes. In Voronezh Gubernia, a
      peasant who owns one horse usually has to payabout eighteen
      rublesa year in taxes alone, while he cannot make more than
      seventy-five rubles a year to meetallhis expenses. Under these
      circumstances it is sheer mockery to talk about buying land, about
      improved implements, about agricultural banks: those things were not
      invented for the poor.

Whereis the peasant to get the money from? He has to look for
      “earnings” on the side. A peasant who owns one horse, like the
      peasant who owns none, ekes out a living only with the help of
      “earnings.”  But what does “earnings” mean? It means
      working for others, working for hire. It means that the peasant who owns
      one horse has half ceased to be an independent farmer and has become a
      hireling, a proletarian. That is why such peasants are calledsemi
      proletarians.They, too, are brothers to the town workers because
      they, too, are fleeced in every way by all sorts of employers. They, too,
      have no way out, no salvation, except by uniting with the Social-Democrats
      to fight all the rich, all the property-owners. Who works on the building
      of railways? Who is fleeced by the contractors? Who goes out lumbering and
      timber-floating? Who works as farm-hand? Or as day labourer? Who does the
      unskilled work in the towns and ports? It is always the rural poor, the
      peasants who have no horses or only one each. It is always the rural
      proletarians and semi-proletarians. And what vast numbers of these there
      are in Russia! It has been calculated that throughout Russia (exclusive of
      the Caucasus and Siberia) eight and sometimes even ninemillionpassports are taken out yearly. Those are all for migratory workers. They
      are peasants only in name; actually, they are hirelings,
      wage-labourers. They must all unite in one union with the town
      workers—and every ray of light and knowledge that reaches the
      countryside will strengthen and consolidate this unity.

Thereis one more point about “earnings” that must not be
      forgotten. All kinds of officials and people who think as the officials do
      are fond of saying that the peasant, the muzhik, “needs” two
      things: land (but not very much of it— besides, he cannot get much,
      because the rich have grabbedit all!) and “earnings.” Therefore, they say, in order to help the
      people, it is necessary to introduce more trades in the rural districts,
      to “provide” more “earnings.” Such talk is sheer
      hypocrisy. For the poor, “earnings” mean wage-labour. To
      “provide earnings” for the peasant means transforming him into
      a wage-labourer. Fine sort of assistance this! For the rich peasants there
      are other kinds of “earnings,” which require capital, for instance,
      the building of a flour-mill or some other plant, the purchase of
      threshing-machines, trade, and so on. To confuse the earnings of moneyed
      people with thewage-labourof the poor means deceiving the
      poor. Of course, this deception is to the advantage of the rich; it is to
      their advantage to make it appear that all kinds of “earnings”
      are open to and within the reach ofallthe peasants. But he who
      really cares for the welfare of the poor will tellthe whole truth and
      nothing but the truth.

Itremains for us to consider the middle peasants. We have already seen
      that, on the average, taking Russia as a whole, we must regard as a middle
      peasant one who has a pair of draught animals, and that out of a total of
      ten million households there are about two million middle peas ant
      households in the country. The middle peasant stands between the rich
      peasant and the proletarian, and that is why he is called a middle
      peasant. His standard of living, too, is middling: in a good year he makes
      ends meet on his farm, but poverty is always knocking at the door. He has
      either very few savings or none at all. That is why his farm is in a
      precarious position. He finds it hard to get money: only very seldom can
      he make as much money out of his farm as he needs, and if he does, it is
      just barely enough. To go out for earnings would mean neglecting the farm
      and everything would go to rack and ruin. Nevertheless, many of the middle
      peasants cannot get along with out earnings: they, too, have to hire
      themselves to others; want compels them to go into bondage to the
      landlord, to fall into debt. And once in debt the middle peasant is hardly
      ever able to get out of it, for unlike the rich peasant he has no steady
      income. Therefore, once he falls into debt it is as if he had put his neck
      in a halter. He remains a debtor until he is utterly ruined. It is chiefly
      the middle peasantwho falls into bondage to the landlord, because for work paid on a job
      basis the landlord needs a peasant who is not ruined, one who owns a pair
      of horses and all implements required in farming. It is not easy for the
      middle peas ant to go elsewhere in search of earnings, so he goes into
      bondage to the landlord in return for grain, permission to use pasture
      land, the lease of the cut-off lands, and money advances during the
      winter. The middle peasant is hard pressed, not only by the landlord and
      the kulak, but also by his rich neighbour, who is always one jump ahead
      when he wants to acquire more land and never misses an opportunity to
      squeeze him in some way or other. Such is the life of the middle peasant;
      he is neither fish nor fowl. He can be neither a real master nor a
      worker. All the middle peasants strive to become masters: they want to be
      property-owners, but very few succeed. There are a few, a very few, who
      even hire farm-hands or day labourers, try to become rich on the labour of
      others, to rise to wealth on the backs of others. But most middle peasants
      have no money to hire labourers— in fact, they have to hire
      themselves out.

Wherevera struggle begins between the rich and the poor, between the
      property-owners and the workers, the middle peasant remains in between,
      not knowing which side to take. The rich call him to their side: you, too,
      are a master, a man of property, they say to him, you have nothing to do
      with the penniless workers. But the workers say: the rich will cheat and
      fleece you, and there is no other salvation for you but to help us in our
      fight against all the rich. This struggle for the middle peasant is going
      on everywhere, in all countries, wherever the Social-Democratic workers
      are fighting to emancipate the working people. In Russia the struggle is
      just beginning. That is why we must most care fully study the matter and
      understand clearly the deceits the rich resort to in order to win over the
      middle peasant; we must learn how to expose these deceits and help the
      middle peasant to find his real friends. If the Russian Social-Democratic
      workers at once take the right road, we shall establish a firm alliance
      between the rural workers and the urban workers more quickly than our
      comrades, the German workers, and we shall speedily achieve victory over
      all the enemies of the working people.

[1]These and all subsequent figures concerning the amount of land are very
      much out of date. They refer to the years 1877-78. But we have no more
      up-to-date figures. The Russian Government can only survive by keeping
      things in the dark, and that is why complete and truthful information
      about the life of the people throughout our country is so rarely
      collected. (A dessiatine=2.7 acres,—Ed.)
    —Lenin

[2]We repeat that the figures quoted are average, approximate figures. The
      number of rich peasants may not be exactly a million and a half, but a
      million and a quarter, or a million and three-quarters, or even two
      million. That is not a big difference. The important thing here is not to
      count them up to the last thousand or last hundred thousand, but clearly
      to realise the strength and the position of the rich peasants so that we
      may be able to recognise our enemies and our friends, that we shall not
      allow ourselves to be deceived by tales or empty talk, but get to know
      accurately the position of the poor and especially the position of the
      rich.

Letevery rural worker carefully study his own volost and the neighbouring
      volosts. He will see that we have counted correctly, and that, on the
      average, this will be the position everywhere: out of every hundred
      households there will be ten, at the most twenty, rich families, some
      twenty middle peasants, and all the rest are poor.
    —Lenin